@sabre23ts: Nope, it likely hasn’t affected much. Wayfarer itself has very little ties to openstreetmap, all maps shown there are google anyway.

Wayfarer handles the POI’s that are nominated to become portals in the games, but admittedly the ones trying to get POI’s are likely to have a good bit of overlap with the ones looking at how to get stuff added (visibly or gameplay effects) though OSM.

Ideally one would place them all under ‘devoted’, but in any such context (both wayfarer and OSM) you’re likely to get a few rotten apples. Even wayfarer has to weed out a ton of bad proposals - I’m thinking the ‘good contributions’ to OSM compared to the bad ratio is far better then the ‘good portal to bad portal’ ratio though. From my own reviews, it’s around a 50/50 there..

An awful lot goes on ‘under the hood’, and what’s known is largely by piecing together stuff from data. Niantic hasn’t exactly been transparent, but in the era where the use of ‘scanners’ (bot accounts from which data points were collected), high enough correlation with certain data sources was achieved to rule out ‘coincidence’.

To this date, I can link the recorded spawnpoints for watertypes (non-nest) by knowing where the main waterways run underground through the city.

I’m not sure why they avoid a map update, maybe to avoid showing their hand too much? Maybe to avoid playing into abuse? Can’t imagine it being such an outrageous effort to update the map. I can only judge for my local area, but over the past four years, the map has drastically evolved and improved, and it’s a shame that’s not reflected in-game.

On a side-note, with a limited ‘revival’ on scanners + an OSM background behind them, I do hope to pool notes with remarks about incorrect data to further improve OSM.

The deciding factor appears to be ‘whichever portal has received most upvotes in Ingress’. Older portals have of course had more time to accumulate these, and especially if it’s a ‘landmark’ thing. But that said, for a majority of cases around here (63k population city) it takes a very limited number of upvotes to ‘steer’ the choice towards preference.

There’s indeed not much motivation for Ingress folks to vote to remove existing portals, but it does happen, unless that affects either their in-game medals (need some achievements in those along with AP to be able to level up), or they have a grudge against the Pokemon Go players (not entirely uncommon).

Part two of the reaction:

You claimed ‘they added more’ -> must’ve been an Ingress player that pushed for a few extra portals. They get outdated -> Yes, the world changes. Ingress players can also opt to nominate portals for removal, or to update a picture for them, or move them slightly. Pokemon trainers (or folks playing both) tend to be less prone to ‘remove’ them (as it can negatively affect their gameplay), but every now and then some disappear. There’s been a tendency to remove any portal that’s in the center of a roundabout for example, as it’s pretty much a guideline the stops needs to be accessible to pedestrians. Over 3 years, we’ve lost two gyms in my city, and a few pokestops. On the other hand, I must admit we still have a few (both stops/gyms) for things no longer there.

As far as the basemap getting outdated: Niantic isn’t exactly keeping up nicely with the tiles they generated as in-game basemap… to avoid having to regenerate tiles for the entire world. The visual basedmap is (I think) based on december 2017 data. The difference in my city would be fairly significant in some spots by now.

But the slower update cycle makes it at least appear that ‘vandalism for own benefit’ has a minimal chance of actually being able to kick into effect.

@LivingWithDragons :

Niantic has a ‘POI’-database they’ve collected over the years, and both Ingress / Pokemon Go / Wizards Unite draw from that database.

The data for this database is crowd-sourced: * Ingress players with a level of 10 or higher, get the option to nominate ‘portals’, at a limited rate of 14 every two weeks. * Every proprosed portal goes through a review-process, called ‘OPR’ (Operation Portal Recon, iirc). Players who’ve reached level 12 or up in Ingress get to review the proposals.

Portals that get accepted though OPR are added to Ingress, and synced to Pokemon Go a day after (at a fixed time), if the portal falls within the rules for pokestop creation. The process for this relies on the use of S2-cells. If there’s no existing pokestop/gym in a lvl 17 s2-cell around it, it’s eligible to come over, if there is already an object in it, it doesn’t come over. Based on how many stops there are within a lvl 14 s2-cell, one of the pokestops will be converted into a ‘gym’. Upvotes in Ingress can help determine which.

Now you’ve realised that Ingress and HP:WU have different ‘rules’ to determine which things are shown in-game. But the photograph, title and possibly additional info are always sourced by Ingress-players…

UNLESS… it’s in one of the countries where (possibly due to a lack of portal density/ingress players) the portal nomination is opened up to Pokemon Go-players aswell. Mostly south-american countries are in this case, ( https://www.reddit.com/r/TheSilphRoad/comments/b79e62/current_map_of_countries_that_can_submit/ for reference).The pokestop submissions are treated similarly through OPR, relying on Ingress players to judge it was ‘worthy’ portals or not.

Use common sense with sidewalks though: if they are just part of the road, don’t map them seperately if the map is ‘basic’.

A sidewalk that has no seperation from the road other then a gutter/curbstone combo shouldn’t be mapped seperately in my opinion, as it’s needlessly cluttering the map.I’d avoid it, unless the entire area is highly micro-mapped.

Well that’s one way to be overly dramatic…

Granted, some of that is ‘poor mapping’ (naming it ‘walking path’ and not setting the baseball field as a pitch, …) but well.. there’s good intent. How a community responds to such things, helps define how much influx you’ll get to the active editing userbase, and how the osm-community is perceived overall.

While I’d love to have a glass of whatever you’ve been drinking - please tone it down quite a bit if you’re going to reach out to whoever did that.

Nice post. Being both a mapper and player, I can agree with most of this.

I’d like to add that the mapping community has a role to play aswell. Personally, I have an RSS feed for any changeset in a 20 km radius to track what changes. As an active player, usually on username alone, I can spot the Pokemon Go players.

There’s two approaches: * If it’s obvious vandalism, revert and inform the mapper that he’s vandalising a ‘greater good’ project for own benefit. * If it’s Pokemon-inspired, but not inherently incorrect, try to give them a gentle nudge.. stating: okay, I see what you did there, and it’s not a bad start.. but what about the benches? and the trashcans? and you’ve even missed a few paths there…

Paths in particular are relevant: 1) they are also said to help generate spawn points. 2) there’s few usergroups walking around THAT MUCH while looking at a rendered map. They are very much more likely then your average armchair mapper to spot where they are missing.

Also, while the effects of certain tags/landuses is fairly well-documented (the Berlin ‘meganest’ with the plateau tags), there’s also a bit of an urban legend about node density having an effect. If that leads people to add qualitative data to OSM, let’s please not try and debunk that.